Good Food Collective adds choice to its selection

After a decade of matching consumers of local foods with farmers, the Good Food Collective is branching out to offer a new product: choice.

A subscription service that provides a range of fresh produce depending on what’s in season, the Wayne County-based collective until now has offered no choice in the contents of its basic share of produce. Members could choose the size of the box of vegetables and could add on items, but the main components were decided by the collective’s management, despite the pickiness of some customers’ little ones.

“From the beginning, we made a conscious decision to eliminate some of that choice,” said Ryan Pierson, director of the Good Food Collective. “That was our way of making sure farmers got a commitment.” Before a farmer plants a row of, say, dinosaur kale, it’s necessary to make sure there will be a market for that vegetable. But the tricky part is not all palates agree on what vegetables are the yummiest.

“There are some members who want kale every week and some members who want almost no kale,” Pierson said.

Because the collective and its parent organization, Headwater Food Hub, have grown to include 150 farmers and many wholesale accounts, someone somewhere in the Headwater network will be happy to take the kale that some collective members eschew, making choice possible. The farmer still has someone to take the product, and the kale that might cause a dinner-table tantrum in your 5-year-old is featured instead on the menu of a fancy restaurant.

Silas Conroy, supply chain manager at Headwater Food Hub, said, “By engineering our supply chain to include frequent farm pickups and more partners to process farm excesses, we’re able to respond quickly to customer demand, while still helping farmers sell their whole crop and reduce waste. This enables members to choose more of the products they love on a weekly basis.”

Starting in September, all subscribers to the collective’s vegetable shares have been able to pick from as many as 28 choices of veggies rather than accept a box with 7 to 11 items already selected. Pierson said the choice option was rolled out site by site—most members pick up shares at workplaces or a community drop-off point.

“People are very excited about it. There’s a number of people who right away said, ‘This is something I’ve been waiting for,’ ” Pierson said.  Of the members who are now getting a custom share instead of the basic share, about half have moved away from the traditional box and the other half are new customers altogether, Pierson said.

Members can make their choices online. A custom share costs $33 a week, while a traditional share costs $28.

Pierson said the 51-week-a-year subscription service has served 1,800 members in the past year, though the number from week to week varies, as people can start and stop the service whenever they want. A recent week saw 700 members. Unlike a Community Sponsored Agriculture plan, the collective doesn’t require a full season commitment, Pierson noted.

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